Cloud computing is gaining traction in the commercial world, but can such
an approach also meet the computing and data storage demands of the nation’s
scientific community? A new program funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment
Act through the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) will examine cloud computing
as a cost-effective and energy-efficient computing paradigm for scientists to
accelerate discoveries in a variety of disciplines, including analysis of scientific
data sets in biology, climate change and physics.

Cloud computing refers to a flexible model for on-demand access to a shared
pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage,
applications, services and software) that can be easily provisioned as needed.
While shared resources are not new to high-end scientific computing, smaller
computational problems are often run on departmental Linux clusters with software
customized for the science application. Cloud computing centralizes the resources
to gain efficiency of scale and permit scientists to scale up to solve larger
science problems while still allowing the system software to be configured as
needed for individual application requirements.

To test cloud computing for scientific capability, DOE centers at the Argonne
Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) in Illinois and the National Energy
Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) in California will install similar
mid-range computing hardware, but will offer different computing environments.
The combined set of systems will create a cloud testbed that scientists can
use for their computations while also testing the effectiveness of cloud computing
for their particular research problems. Since the project is exploratory, it’s
been named Magellan in honor of the Portuguese explorer who led the first effort
to sail around the globe and for whom the “clouds of Magellan” –
two small galaxies in the southern sky – were named.

One of the goals of the Magellan project is to explore whether cloud computing
can help meet the overwhelming demand for scientific computing. Although computation
is an increasingly important tool for scientific discovery, and DOE operates
some of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, not all research applications
require such massive computing power. The number of scientists who would benefit
from mid-range computing far exceeds the amount of available resources.

“As one of the world’s leading providers of computing resources
to advance science, the Department of Energy has a vested interest in exploring
new options for meeting the overwhelming demand for computing time,” said
Michael Strayer, associate director of DOE’s Office of Advanced Scientific
Computing Research. “Both NERSC and ALCF have proven track records in
deploying innovative new systems and providing essential support services to
the scientists who use those systems, so we think the results of this project
will be quite valuable as we chart future courses.”

DOE is funding the project at $32 million, with the money divided equally between
Argonne National Laboratory and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where
NERSC is located.

"Cloud computing has the potential to accelerate discoveries and enhance
collaborations in everything from optimizing energy storage to analyzing data
from climate research, while conserving energy and lowering operational costs,"
said Pete Beckman, director of Argonne’s Leadership Computing Facility
and project lead. “We know that the model works well for business applications,
and we are working to make it equally effective for science.”

At NERSC, the Magellan system will be used to measure a broad spectrum of the
DOE science workload and analyze its suitability for a cloud model by making
Magellan available to NERSC’s 3,000 science users. NERSC staff will use
performance-monitoring software to analyze what kinds of science applications
are being run on the system and how well they perform on a cloud.

“Our goal is to get a global picture of Magellan’s workload so
we can determine how much of DOE’s mid-range computing needs could and
should run in a cloud environment and what hardware and software features are
needed for science clouds,” said NERSC Director Kathy Yelick. “NERSC’s
users will play a key role in this evaluation as they will bring a very broad
scientific workload into the equation and help us learn which features are important
to the scientific community.”

Looking at a spectrum of DOE scientific applications, including protein structure
analysis, power grid simulations, image processing for materials structure analysis
and nanophotonics and nanoparticle analysis, the Magellan research team will
deploy a large cloud test bed with thousands of Intel Nehalem CPU cores. The
project will also explore commercial offerings from Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

In addition, Magellan will provide data storage resources that will be used
to address the challenge of analyzing the massive amounts of data being produced
by scientific instruments ranging from powerful telescopes photographing the
universe to gene sequencers unraveling the genetic code of life. NERSC will
make the Magellan storage available to science communities using a set of servers
and software called “Science Gateways,” as well as experiment with
Flash memory technology to provide fast random access storage for some of the
more data-intensive problems.

The NERSC and ALCF facilities will be linked by a groundbreaking 100 gigabit-per-second
network, developed by DOE’s ESnet (another DOE initiative funded by the
Recovery Act). Such high bandwidth will facilitate rapid transfer of data between
geographically dispersed clouds and enable scientists to use available computing
resources regardless of location.

“It is clear that cloud computing will have a leading role in future
scientific discovery,” added Beckman. “In the end, we will know
which scientific application domains demonstrate the best performance and what
software and processes are necessary for those applications to take advantage
of cloud services.”